Marvel VFX Workers Vote to Unionize with IATSE

August 8, 2023 12:44 AM

A "supermajority" of Marvel's 50-plus visual effects crew signed authorization cards with the union.

“For almost half a century, workers in the visual effects industry have been denied the same protections and benefits their coworkers and crewmates have relied upon since the beginning of the Hollywood film industry,” Mark Patch, VFX organizer for IATSE, said in a statement. “This is a historic first step for VFX workers coming together with a collective voice demanding respect for the work we do.”

posted by brundlefly (21 comments total)

GOOD! Very happy for them. Let's hope this is the sea change for the whole VFX industry...
posted by bigendian at 1:39 AM on August 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

It's really been needed for a long, long time. I wanted to be a VFX artist as a kid and I feel like I dodged a bullet.
posted by brundlefly at 1:59 AM on August 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

Ooooh wow.

This is gonna be Bloody and Painful for many people, but I hope the Union prevails.
posted by Faintdreams at 2:22 AM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Good luck to them!
posted by Jon_Evil at 3:58 AM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

⚒️👊
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:39 AM on August 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

I was part of an earlier (1995 or so) failed attempt at this.
I hope this works out better this time.
CG is now a totally mature industry and should have the labor practices that have been shown to work best in that context.
posted by hexatron at 5:06 AM on August 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Now do Marvel comic writers.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:44 AM on August 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

VFX artists assemble!
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:00 AM on August 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Are these the people who worked on Across the Spiderverse, or was it a different team? In either case, they deserve to work sane hours.
Back in the 90s, I had a boss who'd built rides for Disney. They'd started work on one ride, and marketing announced it opening months before it was scheduled to be ready. Hit team worked insane hours for months to hit the new deadline. They did it, collected a really nice bonus, and then they all left the field to do something else.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:56 AM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best of luck! I didn’t know Marvel even had in-house VFX artists, I thought it was all external shops, hopefully this doesn’t just lead to marvel dropping the in-house team for a non-union external studio.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:05 AM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Are these the people who worked on Across the Spiderverse

No, that's Sony Pictures Animation.

Further, this group of VFX workers is a small fraction of the number of VFX workers (hundreds on each movie!) that create Marvel movies. Most of that work goes to big studios like ILM and Framestore which are not unionized yet. Still, good beginnings!
posted by riotnrrd at 8:36 AM on August 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Get the Digital Domain VFX artists in on it, too.
posted by tmt at 9:56 AM on August 8, 2023

I saw someone say that this is just the on-set VFX artists, who do stuff like motion capture.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:20 AM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Compare to: TMNT Director Jeff Rowe and producer Seth Rogen didn’t want the animators to be overworked and exhausted, which other studios seem to ignore.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:50 AM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Excellent start.
posted by doctor_negative at 12:12 PM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Compare to: TMNT Director Jeff Rowe and producer Seth Rogen didn’t want the animators to be overworked and exhausted, which other studios seem to ignore.

I hope this is true, and am reminded of the reports of horrible conditions for animators at the Canadian studio that made Sausage Party for Rogen, including unpaid overtime, threats and worker credits being yanked. It started with angry animators showing up in the comments section of this CartoonBrew article and grew from there. The first link notes that once the producers found out about the unpaid overtime they made sure some workers got it, but younger animators still didn't.

Rogen wasn't directly implicated, but as a producer he should have know what the animation studio he hired was doing, and shouldn't have had to wait for animators to brave a culture of fear to finally speak out publicly. Glad to see Rogen appears to have learned something from all that mess.
posted by mediareport at 1:23 PM on August 8, 2023

Now if only we can get them to strike indefinitely, we can finally get rid of marvel movies for good
posted by panama joe at 2:26 PM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

As I understand it, this is only on-set VFX workers, so it's a fairly small minority, but still, it's a start (and probably a good place to start, since they work side by side with union people, working the same hours, etc.)
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:31 PM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Solidarity forever.
posted by sotonohito at 3:10 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

The thought is that if this goes well it'll be "proof of concept" for the rest of the animation industry to unionize yeah.
posted by subdee at 9:06 AM on August 9, 2023

Rogen wasn't directly implicated, but as a producer he should have know what the animation studio he hired was doing, and shouldn't have had to wait for animators to brave a culture of fear to finally speak out publicly.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this. How could Seth Rogen - an actor and producer - have known what was happening at an animation studio that was actively trying to hide the way it was treating its lowest-level employees? He was likely dealing only with the sales team or the higher-level executives, none of whom would have divulged any of this to him as their client.

And it sounds like when he DID find out - at the same time and in the same way everyone else did, after the fact - he kept that in mind when looking for animators for TMNT, so as to avoid the same situation.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:57 AM on August 9, 2023